After Midnight. Diana Palmer
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Charleston’s newest automobile manufacturing company. Nikki had heard that personal tragedy seemed to follow the man, culminating months ago in the violent death of his wife and son in Lebanon during a business trip.
Three weeks ago, he’d moved into the beach house property and his yacht had a slip at the marina. Nikki had seen a photograph of it in the Charleston paper’s society section.
Nikki had never met him, and there were no full-face or close-up photos of him in newspapers, except for one that Nikki had seen in Forbes Magazine. Even the tabloids couldn’t catch him on film. Of course, his family did own one of the biggest tabloids in the country. The Lombards of Houston, like the Seymours of Charleston, came from old money. The difference was, the Lombards still had their money. They lived in New York now, not Texas, where they maintained their exclusive tabloid.
The sound of the plane faded and Nikki stretched again. She felt restless. She knew all the right people and she had a comfortable income from the sculptures she did for local galleries. But she was empty inside. Sometimes it bothered her that she was so completely alone except for her brother.
She had been married, briefly; a marriage that destroyed all her illusions and made her question her own sexuality. Her father needed a favor from a U.S. senator by the name of Mosby Torrance, a South Carolinian. Mosby had been under siege because of, among other things, his long-standing bachelor standing. Mosby had agreed to the favor, which would save Nikki’s father from certain bankruptcy, but only in return for Nikki’s hand in marriage.
Nikki shivered, remembering her delight. Mosby was fourteen years her senior, an Adonis of a man, with blond hair and blue eyes and a trim, athletic figure. She’d been swept off her feet, and nothing would have stopped her from agreeing to the union. She’d only been eighteen years old. Naive. Innocent. Stupid.
Her father might have suspected, but he never really knew about Mosby until it was much too late. Nikki had emerged from the marriage six months later, so shaken that the divorce was final before she was completely rational again.
She never could admit what she’d endured to her father or brother, but afterward, Clayton was especially kind to her. They grew very close, and when their father died, she and her brother continued to share the huge Charleston house near the Battery. As he entered politics, Nikki was his greatest support. She learned to organize, to be a hostess, to charm and coax money from prospective supporters. She did whatever Clayton needed her to do to help him, both at his Charleston office and in Washington, D.C., where she had gained some repute as a hostess. She always created just the right mix of people at banquets and cocktail parties, with motifs and themes that radiated excitement and interest. She was very successful at her endeavors. But the old fears and lack of self-confidence kept her free of relationships of any sort. She couldn’t trust her judgment ever again. She could live without a man in her life, she’d decided. But she was twenty-five and lonely. So lonely.
The sun was getting too warm. She stood up and slipped a silky blue caftan over her green-and-gold bathing suit, loving the feel of it against her soft, tanned skin. A movement on the beach caught her eye and she went to the railing to look out over the ocean. Something black was there, bobbing, in the surf. She frowned and leaned over to get a better look, shading her eyes from the sunlight. A head! It was a person!
Without even thinking, she darted down the steps and ran across the beach, stumbling as the thick sand made her path unwieldy. Her heart raced madly as she began to think of the possibilities. Suppose it was a body washing up on the beach? What if she found herself in the wake of a murder? Or worse, what if it were a drowning victim? She had no lifesaving training, a stupid thing to admit to when she had a holiday home on the beach! She made a mental note even in her panic to sign up for lifesaving courses at the Red Cross.
As she reached the surf, she realized that the body in the water was a man’s. It was muscular and husky and very tall-looking with darkly tanned skin and dark hair. She knelt quickly beside it and felt for a pulse. She found it. Her breath sighed out and she realized only then that she’d been holding it.
She managed to roll the man over onto his belly, just out of the surf. Turning his face to one side, she began to push in the center of his back, a maneuver she’d seen on one of the real-life rescue series on TV. The man began to cough and retch, and she kept pumping. Seconds later, he jerked away from her and sat up, holding his forehead. He was a big man for all his leanness. Thank God, she wasn’t going to have to try and drag him any farther out of the surf!
“Are you all right?” she asked worriedly.
“My head…hurts,” he choked, still coughing.
She hesitated for a second before she began to look through his thick wet hair. She found a gash just above his temple. The blood had congealed and it didn’t look very deep, but he’d been unconscious.
“I think I’d better call an ambulance,” she began. “You could have a concussion.”
“I don’t need an ambulance,” he said firmly. He coughed again. “I fell off a Jet Ski and hit my head. I remember that.” He scowled. “Funny. I can’t remember anything else!”
Nikki sat very still. The hem of her caftan was soaked from the rising surf. She gnawed on her lower lip, a habit from childhood, while she struggled with the question of what to do next.
“Would you like to come up to my beach house and rest for a bit?” she asked in her softly accented voice.
He lifted his head and looked at her, and she felt a shock all the way through her. He seemed very familiar. She couldn’t quite place him, but he looked like someone she knew. Could she have met him at the Spoleto Festival?
“I must be visiting someone around here,” he began slowly. “I couldn’t have come far.”
“You’re disoriented,” she said. “When you’ve rested, perhaps you’ll remember who you are. I believe amnesia of this kind is very temporary.”
“Are you a nurse?”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Why not a doctor?” she asked.
“Why not a nurse?” he asked, his eyes and his tone challenging.
She threw up her hands. “You’re going to be one of those sharp, difficult people, I can tell. Here, let’s see if we can get you underway. Oh, for a wheelbarrow…” She eyed him. “Make that a front-end loader.”
“If you’re trying out for stand-up comedy,” he murmured, “don’t give up your day job.”
His deep voice was unaccented. If anything it sounded midwestern. He was wearing a waterproof Rolex watch and the swimming trunks he had on were designer marked. He was no transient. And he was much too old to be a college student on summer vacation, she thought wickedly as she noted the streaks of gray at his temples. He had to be almost forty. Certainly he was older than her brother.
She felt uncomfortable with the close physical contact that was necessary now, but she forced herself to yield to the situation. He couldn’t very well stay down here on the beach all day.
She eased under his arm and slid her hand around his back. His skin was olive tan and silky, rippling with muscle. He was fit for a man of his age, she thought, her eyes dropping involuntarily to the broad chest with an incredibly thick mass of curling black hair that ran in a wedge from his collarbone all the way down into the low-slung swimming trunks around his lean hips. Most men, since her marriage, repelled Nikki. This man, strangely, didn’t. She already felt comfortable with him, as if the sight of his almost nude body was familiar to her.
Of course, he had the kind of body that even a disinterested woman couldn’t help but admire right down to long, tanned, powerful legs with just enough hair to be masculine and not offensive. She drew his arm over her shoulder, holding it by the hand. He had nice hands, too, she thought. Very lean and big, with oval nails immaculately kept. No jewelry at all. She wondered if that was deliberate. Where his watch had shifted, there was no white line, so his tan must be of the year-round variety.
“Easy does it,” she