Drowning Read Free Page A

extremely neat. Only two broad, muddy tracks soiled its pristine floor. The strip light in the ceiling was on, although it made little difference in the general dark gloom of that rainy morning. I could hear the crackle of a radio coming from the car, and saw that the driver’s door was open.
    Stepping carefully to avoid the tracked mud, I made my way toward the open door, and as I did so I recognized the voice I’d heard the previous night.
    “No. The road is totally impassable. Do you copy? The bridge has been washed away.”
    Strong, deep, authoritative, the words clipped but the accent impossible to place. Not quite British, but definitely not the local South African I’d heard spoken here. A blend of both, perhaps.
    The radio crackled again, the speaker saying something I couldn’t make out, and he replied, “We’ll have to fly those down to them. Get a search and rescue operation under way as soon as the storm is over.”
    As I reached the open door, the man in the car turned his head and looked straight at me.
    I was dazzled by the blaze of his light, extraordinary blue-green eyes. The palest turquoise, burning in the sculpted gold-tanned planes of his face. Blinking, I took in his strong bone structure, a trace of stubble along the firm line of his jaw. His tousled sandy-blonde hair looked to be in need of a cut, although for some reason its disarray only added to his attractiveness.
    Under his faded blue T-shirt, his shoulders looked broad and powerful.
    Mr. Nicholas was astoundingly good-looking, in an utterly masculine and somewhat rugged way. God, my camera would love him, if only it weren’t at the bottom of a flooded river.
    Briefly, I wondered how old he was. Crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes suggested a certain maturity. Early thirties, perhaps?
    How exactly had I landed myself in a luxury game lodge owned, or managed at least, by this demi-god? For a moment, I wondered if I was unconscious in the hospital somewhere and this was all an elaborate dream.
    I wasn’t dreaming, of course not. This was real. In fact, he was looking me up and down, too; his gaze traveling over me in a way that was both assessing and approving. I watched him take in my deep blue eyes and freshly washed dark hair, and saw that he noted how my borrowed shorts, too summery for this chilly rainstorm, exposed a fair amount of my legs, slender and still pale from the winter weather I’d left behind at home.
    In his left hand he held the crackling radio receiver, and he lifted it to speak again into the mike, “I have to go. I’ll be back in five. You copy? Over.”
    He put the radio down and turned back to me.
    “You’re looking a lot better this morning. How are you feeling?”
    Reaching out, he took hold of my right hand, and I tensed for just a moment as he held it in his warm, firm grasp. The fingers of his other hand pressed on the inside of my wrist in a practiced manner. His touch was just the way I remembered it. I had never imagined, though, that the stranger sitting so patiently by my bedside in the darkness last night had been this man. That fact made me feel surprisingly short of breath. If I’d known… if I’d been able to see him, I don’t know if I would have held his hand so innocently.
    “I’m fine, thank you. Apart from feeling rather shaken up. And my chest is bruised.”
    “Pulse is a touch faster than normal,” he observed, gently releasing my wrist. “Nothing to worry about, though. As far as the chest goes, I’m to blame for that. By the time I pulled you out, your lungs were flooded and your heart had stopped. I had to do CPR for a while before you came back.”
    I stared at him, looking into those piercing, unusual eyes as his gaze burned into mine. I couldn’t help feeling astonished by what he had just said. My heart had stopped? My heart ? No way. And he’d had to do CPR… I had a sudden vision of this man bent over me, pounding at my chest with the heels of his hands, crushing my