Nathan's Child Read online

  “Where’s Lacey?” she demanded. Lacey had flown over with Hugh once, but she’d been so stricken by the sight of her mother all banged up that Carin had told Hugh not to bring her again until she was ready to come home.

  Lacey needed to feel that her mother could cope. And seeing her in the hospital, barely able to do anything for herself, didn’t lend itself to the notion of coping. After three days she was better. She could feed herself. She could hobble around—just. She had thought Lacey would be here to witness her progress and her return home.

  But Nathan just said, “She’s getting the house ready for you.”

  And Carin had to be satisfied with that. In fact, it was probably just as well Lacey hadn’t come, since the mere trip to the helicopter wore Carin out.

  She tried to appreciate the beauty of the island as Hugh took off and eagerly pointed things out to her. But the combination of fatigue and pain medication got to her before they’d gone far, and she felt her eyes close.

  When she woke up, she found her head against a warm male chest. She jerked and looked up and found herself staring into Nathan’s blue eyes.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She pulled away and tried to sit up. “Fine. I’m fine.”

  She managed to stay awake until Hugh set the copter down on the small landing field near the cricket grounds. Then he carried her bags to his waiting van and Nathan carried her.

  “I can walk,” Carin protested.

  But Nathan ignored her. “Humor me,” he said. “I love carrying wriggling females.”

  She shot him a look of annoyance and stayed perfectly still to spite him, then realized that was exactly what he had in mind.

  He tucked her into the second seat of the van and clambered into the back one, then reached up and slung the door shut. “All set,” he told Hugh who was in the driver’s seat.

  Hugh put the van in gear, and they rumbled out of the field and onto the road. Carin was leaning forward eagerly now, looking forward to seeing the town, to seeing her house, to being home again. It felt as if she’d been gone a year, not merely a few days.

  “Hugh! My house is that way!” She pointed to the right fork when Hugh took the left.

  Hugh just kept driving, bouncing them along the rutted road toward the far end of the island.

  The penny dropped. “Oh, no.” Carin protested. “You’re not taking me to Nathan’s!”

  “You can’t stay at your place,” he said practically.

  “Certainly I can! Stop this car! Hugh, turn around!”

  But Hugh neither stopped nor turned. He wound through the jungly woods heading directly for Nathan’s place.

  “Damn it!” Carin shoved herself up, making her arm hurt. “You can’t kidnap me like this!”

  “Fine. We’ll just go back to the copter and take you back to the hospital.”

  “Take me home!”

  “Can’t.” He shook his head. “Doc said you need care.”

  “I’ll get care. Lacey can—”

  “Lacey’s a child,” Nathan said firmly. “And you are an adult. So why don’t you try acting like one.”

  Carin glared at him, furious at being told off that way. “How dare you! She’s my daughter! She can—”

  “No doubt she can,” Nathan cut in. “Our daughter is bright and capable and she would probably bend over backward to do whatever you wanted her to do because you’re her mother and she realizes how much you’ve done for her. But—” he fixed her with a hard level stare “—I would hope you’re not selfish enough to ask her to do it.”

  Carin opened her mouth, then closed it again. She sat, rigid, glaring at him, hating him for putting her at such a disadvantage, for being right, for making her feel like a fool. She didn’t speak, just glowered.

  He didn’t back down. “She’s at my place now, fixing up a room for you, making it nice for you. She and Estelle have been working on turning my dad’s office into a bedroom for you so you can be on the main floor and you won’t have to climb stairs, which you would have to do at your house…”

  “I could have,” Carin said sulkily.

  “And the very least you can do,” Nathan went on, “is to be grateful to her for her efforts. You can stop acting like a spoiled child and start acting like a mother.”

  Carin felt as if steam was going to come right out of her ears. “I’m not selfish! You’re the one who’s being selfish! Pushing into our lives, taking over, shoving into my gallery opening, forcing me to stay at your place—”

  “Get it out of your system now,” Nathan said implacably. “Because you’d better not carry on like this in front of Lacey. Bad enough you’re doing it in front of Hugh.”

  Hugh? Dear God, she’d forgotten about Hugh, driving silently on toward Nathan’s, listening and not responding at all.

  “Whose side are you on?” she asked him now.

  His gaze flicked up, and their eyes met in the rearview mirror. He looked abashed and apologetic. “Nath’s just trying to help, Carrie.”

  Carin arched a brow. “Nath?” she echoed. “Are you two buddies now?” She looked at Hugh accusingly.

  “We’ve, um, talked…”

  “Talked? And what did he tell you? Did he tell you he’s trying to run my life?”

  “And you’re making it such a pleasure,” Nathan said dryly.

  Carin flushed and glared at him.

  “The doc said you couldn’t be going up and down stairs and you had to have someone with you or he wouldn’t let you leave. You know I don’t have any place to put you up. And Lachlan’s place is full this time of year. And it would be a hell of an imposition on Estelle and Maurice.”

  “I know that,” Carin muttered.

  “So Nathan said you could stay with him.”

  “Out of the kindness of his heart,” Carin grumbled, disbelieving.

  “Exactly,” Nathan said, his tone gruff but something of a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth. Their gazes met. Something electric seemed to sizzle between them.

  If she were healthy and whole she would run a mile, Carin thought.

  “You’re doing this for Lacey,” she told Nathan sternly. Not for me. “Right, Nathan?”

  He just looked at her. “What do you think?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SHE WAS IN TROUBLE being at Nathan’s 24/7.

  But she was stuck and she knew it.

  As the doctor had predicted, she couldn’t manage on her own. It wasn’t just climbing the stairs in her house with her badly sprained ankle that she couldn’t have done. She couldn’t do simple things like cooking a meal or washing dishes. She certainly couldn’t frame her pictures or work at the store.

  Just getting through the day was a struggle.

  “Accidents do that,” Nathan said, taking her weakness in stride and with far more equanimity than she did.

  Of course he did, she told herself, because he was getting what he wanted!

  But why any sane man would want to be stuck with a cranky, annoying invalid and an exuberant twelve-year-old girl she couldn’t imagine.

  Nathan seemed to take her crankiness and Lacey’s endless enthusiasm in stride, too.

  He pretty much ignored the first and he actually encouraged the second. Mostly he seemed to be able to cope.

  She wanted to be furious with him, to hate his bossiness and his presumptuousness and his general all-around taking over of her life.

  But it was hard to hate the man who carried her to the bathroom, when she needed to get there, because she couldn’t use crutches and her leg wouldn’t let her put weight on it at first. It was hard to dislike him when he cooked her dinner and brought her breakfast and fixed her lunch. And it was hard to stay angry with a man who got up in the middle of the night to check on her and who every night bedded down on the sofa in the living room so he would be close enough for her to call if she needed something.

  She wanted to turn away from him, to fight him, to resist him and, damn him, he was making it alm
ighty difficult.

  Of course, from the start she’d been cornered into calling a truce. After what he’d said about Lacey worrying about her, she’d had no choice. And once they got there, she’d understood what he meant.

  Lacey had been standing on the porch, practically bouncing with joy at the sight of her mother. She had been so eager to have Carin back home, so obviously worried about her, and so delighted that they would all be there together at Nathan’s and that “everything would be all right now,” that Carin knew she had to try to make sure it was.

  That meant she couldn’t fight with Nathan when Lacey was around. But the fact was, as the days went by, she couldn’t seem to fight with him, anyway.

  He was still bossy and interfering and thought he knew best. But he was also making their daughter feel happy and secure. He was allowing Lacey to be a child instead of her mother’s caretaker.

  Carin was grateful for that.

  At the same time, though, it made her want more. It made her want things she’d wanted years ago, when she’d been starry-eyed and in love.

  And she didn’t want to want that. Loving Nathan and not being loved in return simply hurt too much.

  Still, at the moment she couldn’t change things. She had to stay here until she was well enough to go home. When at last she and Lacey were on their own again, she would do what she could to restore the distance between herself and Nathan.

  In the meantime…in the meantime she was living dangerously.

  Oh, yes.

  Every day she felt herself sucked further into the web of desire. It was, in some ways, like the week they’d spent together all those years ago. She hadn’t wanted to want him then, either. But what her mind knew, her body disagreed with, and her heart…her heart was torn.

  Watching Nathan day after day—studying him surreptitiously when he was cooking dinner in the kitchen or out on the deck repairing a railing or at the desk in the living room, bent over his light table picking over his slides—was a treat and a torture at the same time.

  She’d always liked looking at Nathan. And his lean, agile young man’s body had matured well. He was still lean, though not slender. His shoulders were broader than she remembered, his arms were harder and more muscular. There was a bit more hair on his tanned chest.

  Nathan’s chest, Carin decided—purely from an artist’s perspective, of course—was a work of art. She knew that some men worked hard at the gym to achieve masculine perfection.

  Nathan’s beauty was a by-product of working hard. And wherever he moved—whether around the kitchen or the garden, on the beach or in the water—he did so with an effortless masculine grace.

  He had always been a man who was comfortable with his body.

  And it was all too easy to remember what he’d been like in bed.

  Carin knew she shouldn’t think about that. But it was impossible not to.

  She was a captive of her injuries, stuck in the house where they’d slept together with far too much time on her hands. It was too easy to look at him and remember. The days were hot, the nights were barely less so. She saw a lot of Nathan’s bare, tanned skin.

  She touched it, too. At night when he came to check on her, he was usually bare-chested and wearing only a pair of shorts. Before she could walk and he carried her into the bathroom or out onto the deck, she felt those strong hard arms supporting her. Her body was pressed against the firm warm wall of his chest.

  She remembered when he’d been hot with passion, remembered when their bodies had linked, when their hearts had beat together, when, however briefly, the two of them had become one.

  They weren’t restful thoughts.

  She tried to stay out of his way.

  “You don’t have to stop and fix lunch for me,” she’d protested when he’d brought her a sandwich and a cup of soup the day after she arrived. It was enough that he had cooked dinner for them the night before and had brought her breakfast in the morning.

  “I’m fixing lunch for me,” he’d said patiently. “Easy enough to make two sandwiches.”

  She would have looked foolish if she had made an issue out of it. So she’d thanked him politely and had eaten the lunch—which had been very good—and every day after that he brought lunch to her in her room or carried her out onto the deck on nice afternoons so she could enjoy the weather.

  Bad. Worse, instead of disappearing again, he sat and ate with her.

  She couldn’t tell him not to. It was his deck.

  Nor could she refuse to answer the perfectly polite questions he asked her and take part in the perfectly pleasant conversations he began. So they talked. Carefully at first, as if they were treading in a minefield, which in many respects they were.

  At first Lacey had hovered around every minute, obviously afraid that leaving them alone together might be a disaster. But as the days passed and the truce endured, like any twelve-year-old, she got bored with spending every minute with her parents. She went to Lorenzo’s. She went to Marcus’s. She went to the shop and helped Elaine or she went to see Hugh and Molly. In other words, she resumed her regular life.

  She had already gone and they were eating lunch one afternoon when Nathan asked Carin about her painting.

  “I remember thinking you had talent when I saw the stuff you showed me,” he said. “But you didn’t have a ‘style’ of your own then.”

  “You’re right. But then I met Gretl.”

  And she told him about Gretl Hagar, the internationally known Austrian folk artist who had spent a winter on Pelican Cay when Lacey was small.

  “Miss Saffron owned the shop then. And I was working for her,” Carin told him, “and dabbling in various artsy things when I could. Gretl used to come by the shop and play with Lacey and talk to me about her work. She encouraged me to find what I liked to do. I told her I didn’t have a lot of time to do anything, except when Lacey was napping. And she said to come to her place and she would play with Lacey a couple of mornings a week and I could work.”

  Nathan’s brows lifted. “Gretl Hagar played with Lacey?” Obviously, even he knew who Gretl was.

  Carin nodded, smiling as she remembered that winter. Gretl had been so kind, so supportive.

  “She said it was important to mentor. Someone had helped her get started. She helped me. I’ve tried to do that, too. Though I’m not nearly the caliber of artist Gretl is.”

  “You’re very good,” Nathan said flatly.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Did you have a mentor?”

  He thought a minute. “Mateo,” he said. “Mateo Villarreal.”

  “I remember Mateo Villarreal.”

  He looked surprised. “You do?”

  “Well, I remember your mentioning him. You’d been climbing with him before you…before you came here for the wedding.”

  And just like that, the years seemed to fall away. The “Do Not Touch” and “Do Not Mention” signs vanished and the past came rushing back.

  When she’d first met Nathan he’d just come back from an Andean expedition with Chilean mountain climber Mateo Villarreal, a man so well-known that even a non-climber like Carin had heard of him.

  During the week they’d spent together, Nathan had told her plenty of Mateo stories. Mateo, he’d assured her, made a guy like Dominic look easy-going. Mateo was intense, focused, demanding and absolutely reliable. Also very funny. It had been easier to think of Dominic as a “whole person” and not just a scary one when she’d heard Nathan’s stories about Mateo.

  She hadn’t gone through with the wedding, though, because in telling the stories, Nathan had endeared himself to her even more. One Mateo story she remembered particularly well because it had, in a way, made her reevaluate her own situation.

  In those days, Nathan had said, he hadn’t been much of a climber. He’d had to push himself to keep up with Mateo on even a moderate climb. Of course, the climb itself wasn’t what he’d gone for. Nathan had been after photos. He’d told her there was a particular route he’
d wanted to climb and Mateo had said no, he wasn’t ready.

  Nathan had argued. “A man needs to test himself.”

  But Mateo had been adamant. “There’s testing and there’s foolishness. And it’s crucial to know which is which. It’s fine to stretch. But you need to respect your limits.”

  It was respecting her limits that had made Carin jilt Dominic. In the abstract, the notion of being married to Dominic Wolfe had been thrilling. He was gorgeous, wealthy, strong, capable, responsible—everything a woman could want in a man.

  He was like Everest. Both towering and tempting.

  Not a challenge in which a novice could succeed. And the closer she’d come to their wedding day, the clearer that had become.

  During the week before the wedding, Nathan had attempted to show her the softer side of Dominic—the human side, the gentle side. He’d shown her that Dominic had traits that made him human, that she could relate to.

  It wasn’t Dominic she’d doubted in the end.

  It was herself.

  Facing marriage to Dominic, Carin had learned her limits.

  Now she wondered if she was pushing the limits again—sitting here talking to Nathan, feasting her eyes on him, enjoying his company.

  She finished her glass of iced tea. “I’d better let you get back to work,” she said abruptly. Nathan looked startled. A flicker of something—annoyance? irritation?—crossed his face. But then it was a mask of politeness again.

  He stood up. “I’ll take the dishes into the kitchen. Do you want to stay here or would you like me to carry you back to your room?”

  Carin shook her head and stood up carefully. “I’ll walk.”

  She didn’t need him touching her. Didn’t need more memories or more temptation. It had been a week since her accident. It was time she did what she could for herself. She took a halting step.

  Nathan’s jaw tightened as he watched. “Carin.” His tone was warning.

  She shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said fiercely. “Go take the dishes into the kitchen.”

  He didn’t move, just stood there, prepared to catch her if she fell.

  She wouldn’t fall!

  She saw a muscle ticking in his temple as she made her way past him and slowly limped into her room.