Читать книгу Blade's Lady - Фиона Бранд - Страница 11

She was lying, curled as defenceless as a baby, amidst grass, mud, crumpled cans and takeaway wrappers.

Her very stillness was chilling. For a moment, Blade thought he was too late and that she was dead, but the first touch told him that wasn’t so. The pulse beating at her throat was regular and strong. His ghost was alive, but hurt.

His relief was followed by a short, hard jolt of rage. Blade lived his life on simple terms. He was—or had been, until a few weeks ago—a soldier. In more primitive terms, a warrior. The art of war, the hunt, had been his game. It had excited him as little else had, and he had played it well. But one of his rules had been that women and children had no part in the action. He thought that rule was simple enough even for the bad guys to understand. It ticked him off big time when they didn’t.

Gently, he felt down the length of her body, testing for broken bones; then ran his fingertips over her scalp. When he encountered the goose egg in the centre of her forehead, he flicked on the torch, which was taped so that only a thin slit of light played over her pale features.

Long, wet hair was slicked back from a face that was less than beautiful, more arresting than pretty, an intriguing blend of delicacy and strength and Ambrose Park dirt. She was average in height, maybe taller, and despite having the firm muscle tone of someone who either exercised regularly or worked physically hard, she was finely built. Delicate.

Blade’s stomach twisted as the description registered, and for a dizzying moment a dream image rose up to overlay that of the woman lying on the ground. Fiercely, he shook it off. A lot of women were slender, finely built; it didn’t mean a thing. This woman was real, not a dream.

Cleaned up, he bet she would be something—the kind of woman who should be wearing a slick business suit and sexy high heels, not the loose jeans, sweatshirt and cheap nylon raincoat she was wearing. He put her age at mid-twenties, but something about the taut, moulded shape of her cheekbones and jaw suggested more than the usual strength and character of a woman that age. Even unconscious, there was no softness, just pared-down intensity.

He shook her. She stirred but didn’t open her eyes.

Lightning sheeted across the sky, throwing his shadow across the woman and burning her inert form into his retinas with a searing clarity. Thunder rumbled again, and tension coalesced between his shoulder blades as the rising wind buffeted his back. Too much noise to hear if whoever had attacked the woman was still skulking around, and he could do without the lightning.

He shook her again. She groaned, a husky thread of sound. Her head lolled toward him, and Blade saw the blood, angling across her temple, trickling down one of those exquisite cheekbones. Her eyelids flickered, ridiculously long, velvety lashes lifted, and her blank gaze fastened briefly on his before she sank back into unconsciousness.

Anna knew someone was shaking her.

She tried to wake up, but it was like swimming through molasses, she never quite seemed to make it to the surface. She was tired—so tired—all she wanted to do was sleep, but the voice was insistent, low, dark, with a kind of delicious rumble that she fixed on like a beacon. The hands that held her were shiveringly hot, like an electric charge tingling along her arms. The man, for it was a man, was like fire. The warmth from his body beat against her chilled flesh in waves, and that low voice continued to cajole—as soothing, as animal rough, as a purr. It wasn’t a voice she’d heard before, but it was oddly familiar all the same. It caught her attention and held it, even against the heavy drag of sleep.

She didn’t feel afraid of the voice, although a part of her wondered distantly at her lack of fear; she was too busy listening to the rich, dark cadences, the intriguing roughness, and soaking in the beguiling heat of his hands. She wanted to get closer to that whispery rumble, the magical heat that seemed to reach out and enfold her, and she wondered dreamily what it would feel like, how hot it would be, if she reached out and wrapped herself around him.

The tenor of the voice changed, became more urgent. Abruptly, Anna remembered where she was, the danger she was in. She needed to open her eyes, to wake up. Despite her puzzling response to the man, she didn’t know the voice, and she couldn’t afford to trust it.

Blade tightened his grasp on the woman’s shoulders and shook her again, this time more sharply. He wanted her out of here, ASAP. The drizzle had thickened into hard-driving gusts of rain, and he had a nasty itch running up his spine. He didn’t know how she had ended up in the storm drain, or who she could possibly be, but he didn’t intend for either of them to stay there any longer than they had to. The woman in his dream had been in some kind of trouble, and so had this woman.

It had to be sheer coincidence that he’d found her. City parks were prime spots for trouble of all kinds, especially in areas like this. There would be a logical explanation for her presence that had nothing at all to do with the dreams. He was determined to have that explanation.

Her eyes flickered, opened wide and fixed unblinkingly on him. She went rigid in his grip.

“It’s all right.” He pitched his voice low. “Someone attacked you. You’ve been unconscious. I’m going to take you to a hospital.”

“No hospital.” Her voice was husky, but surprisingly steady.

Anna stared at the man who held her, his large, powerful form crouched over her as he used his body to shield her from the thin, icy rain that whirled in the weak beam of a torch. She struggled to orient herself and failed. She felt as if a giant fist had closed around her heart, her lungs, squeezing until her head spun and she had to fight for breath.

It was him, she thought starkly. Her knight.

He said she’d been unconscious. Maybe she still was, because the man gripping her arms could have strode straight from her dreams. She knew those midnight eyes, the bold slant of his cheekbones, the exotic hollowing beneath; the carnal promise of that mouth framed by that squared warrior’s jaw.

In her dreams he had been vague, veiled, as if a mist had obscured her vision, shifting occasionally to allow tantalising glimpses. Now it was as if a strong wind had blown the mist away; he was pulled into sharp focus, and he was…overwhelming. He should have been clad in dark armour, a helm held carelessly under one arm, his face and hair damp with sweat as he grinned in reckless triumph at another jousting victory. He shouldn’t be here. Now. He belonged in a hundred other places, a hundred other times—between the pages of the novel she was writing.

She wondered if she had conjured him up, if the shock and strain of running from the man who had attacked her, the blow to her head, had affected her mind.

If she was hallucinating, the illusion was nice, she decided a little giddily. Very detailed. Better than the fuzzy images of her dreams, or anything she had ever imagined or committed to a page.

Deliberately, she inhaled, and caught the scents of mud and grass and rain, and the faint drift of something far more potent—warm male and damp leather. The scent of him grounded her with a thump.

He was here. She wasn’t dreaming. Whoever the stranger was, he was real.

His gaze was steady on her, piercing in the dim glow from his torch. “I need to get you out of the rain, and you need a doctor,” he murmured, his voice deep, laced with that smoky rumble.

The sound of it rippled down her backbone, tightened the tender skin at her nape in a primitive shiver of warning.

His hand lifted to her face, fingertips searingly hot against her jaw. “If you can’t walk, I’ll carry you.”

Anna grasped his hand, disconcerted at the sharp thrill of sensation as his fingers closed over hers, aware that the pads of his fingers and palm were rough and calloused instead of city-soft.

“No hospital,” she repeated as evenly as she could manage, given that her heart was still pounding with the aftershock of her discovery, fanciful or not, and a heavy jolt of what she could only label as acute awareness of the man holding her. “I—stumbled and fell. Hit my head. It’s just a bump, I…” She took a breath and pulled herself into a sitting position, wincing as her head spun anew. “I can walk. My briefcase. I need my briefcase.”

“It’s here.”

The relief as her fingers closed over the familiar grip was almost too much. “Good,” she said numbly, unable to prevent the tremor that shook through her. “That’s good.”

She couldn’t risk losing her briefcase. Everything that mattered to her was in it. Her laptop computer and diskettes. The notes for her book. Enough cash that if she had to, she could walk away from her shabby little apartment without her possessions and have enough to survive on until she found another place to live and a new job. Most important of all were the contents of her handbag when she had run all those years ago: credit cards, a driver’s licence, the passport she’d never been able to use. Over the years she’d also amassed a collection of faded newspaper and magazine cuttings—every time some journalist resurrected the mystery of the missing Tarrant heiress, the unstable young woman who had thrown away a life of wealth and privilege in the most flamboyant of gestures, by supposedly driving her expensive sports car over a cliff.

The documents and photos weren’t conclusive proof of her identity—she could have stolen them—but she clung to them; they were hers. She had changed—her breath caught in her throat when she thought of just how much she had changed—but the strong resemblance in those photos was all she had. When she’d stumbled, bruised and bleeding, from her wrecked car all those years ago, she had simply picked up her purse and run. She’d had the clothes on her back, the jewellery she had been wearing and some cash. She hadn’t dared use the credit cards.

She had escaped Henry’s last, clever attempt on her life by sheer blind luck. When her car’s brakes had failed, a tree had been all that had stopped a certain plunge over the cliff’s edge into the water far below.

Her utter helplessness in the face of her stepfather’s relentless determination to remove her from his path had almost paralysed her with fear; but she had known in that moment that she couldn’t afford to stay around—certainly not until she was twenty-seven—and give him another opportunity to kill her. When she’d later discovered that Henry had decided to cut his losses and had pushed her car over the cliff, making it look like she’d died, she had known she’d made the right decision.

She hadn’t gone to the police. She had already tried that avenue, and no one had listened. She’d been twenty years old, and Henry had seen to it that her credibility was less than zero. He had painted a convincing picture of a hysterical young woman balanced on the edge of mental instability. He had done a great job of character assassination, and she had played into his hands on several occasions by openly accusing him of trying to murder her, from the age of eleven on. It had been a case of people thinking she was crying wolf. Even her own mother had believed she was mentally unstable.

Until the sabotage on her car’s brakes, Anna had begun to believe it herself.

No one had given credence to the notion that Henry de Rocheford was doing anything more than looking out for the interests and welfare of the Tarrant family, as he had “selflessly” done for years.

She had to wonder if anyone would now.

Minutes later, they were standing in the shadow of the entranceway to the park.

Anna’s wet coat clung and dragged. Moisture was seeping through in several places, and she was shivering, but she didn’t protest; she wanted to check the street before she stepped out onto it.

Despite the fact that she’d insisted she was capable of walking, she felt disconcertingly weak and was sharply aware that she was in no shape to handle anything else the night might throw at her. She swayed, her hand groping for the rough surface of one of the stone pillars for support, and didn’t protest when the stranger wrapped his arm around her waist, clamping her close against his side. The solid barrier of his body protected her from much of the wind and rain, and the heat that poured from him drove back the worst of the chill. Anna stiffened at her ready acceptance of the stranger’s protection, the extent of her trust in him when she didn’t trust anyone, the disturbing memory of those moments when she’d actually wanted to get closer to him. The bump on her head must have skewed her judgement.

His voice vibrated close to her ear, making her jump. “Where do you live?”

Anna didn’t bother to dissemble. “I have a flat nearby.” There was no point in not telling him where. She would have to leave, anyway. Tomorrow.

“I’ll see you home.”

The statement was delivered flatly, and she wasn’t inclined to argue with it. The stranger was big, well over six feet tall, and from what she had seen and could feel, he was solidly muscled. His arm tightened around her as he urged her across the road to a Jeep.

He helped her into the passenger seat. The Jeep smelled new and expensive. For the first time, it occurred to Anna to question what a well-heeled stranger had been doing strolling through Ambrose Park in the rain, at night, and what had compelled him to even look in the storm drain?

She knew he wasn’t the man who had chased her earlier; he was too tall, for one thing. But what if he had been looking for her? She couldn’t discount that possibility, no matter how much she wanted to trust him.

He swung into the driver’s seat with a sleek, fluid grace that drew her gaze. He had taken his jacket off, and in the dimly lit confines of the cab, his muscled biceps gleamed copper as he twisted and placed the dark bundle in the rear, along with the torch he’d carried. In the short time it had taken him to remove the jacket, his T-shirt had gotten soaked, and now it clung slickly to his broad shoulders and chest.

With dawning apprehension, she realised just how big, how powerfully built, he was, and that he was dressed completely in black: black pants, black boots—even a black watch, with a cover hiding the face. The colour of thieves and assassins.

His hair was long, caught back in a ponytail. She hadn’t noticed that in the dark; she had assumed his hair was short. Anna swallowed, for a moment caught again in the hazy limbo between sleep and wakefulness that had swamped her when she’d regained consciousness. This was no dream, she told herself fiercely. And he was no knight in shining armour, despite the fact that he’d helped her.

She tipped her head back to meet his gaze, and her breath hitched in her throat despite her attempts at control. His eyes were as dark as his clothing, an intense shadow-black that seemed to absorb light, giving nothing back. The effect was sombre, electrifying.

The impact of his face hit her all over again, sending an odd quiver of mingled fear and elation through her, starting a queer shifting sensation deep in her stomach, as if her centre of gravity had just altered and she hadn’t yet found her balance. Heat rose in her as she experienced another heavy jolt of the awareness that had disoriented her so badly earlier, as if she were once more caught in the relentless grasp of one of the vividly sensual dreams that had haunted her through the years.

Abruptly, she transferred her gaze to the rain-washed windscreen. Cold logic and bitterness dashed ice on the mystifying, aching flare of emotion. Whatever improbable fantasies had played through her mind when she’d first seen him, they were just that: improbable. She no doubt had a mild concussion, and her mind was playing bizarre tricks on her. The guy was big, tough and drop-dead gorgeous; he would have women queueing. She wasn’t in the market for a relationship, and even if she were, she had absolutely no confidence in her ability to handle a man like him.

He shoved the key in the ignition; the engine rumbled to life. “Where to?” His gaze locked briefly with hers.

“Second left. Finnegan Street. Number fifty-four.”

Anna felt the touch of his gaze again; then he was all business, checking for traffic as he eased onto the road.

“If I had been going to hurt you, I would have done it back there,” he stated flatly, his voice like dark velvet.

Pitched just that way to soothe her, she thought, realising just how tightly she was wound, just how paranoid her thoughts had become. “If I thought you would hurt me, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

And it was the truth, she realised, startled at how bone-deep that trust had gone. Mysterious though he was to her, she couldn’t shake the extraordinary compulsion to trust him.

Seconds later, he pulled over outside her block of flats.

“Thank you.” She aimed a grateful look in his general direction, fumbled her door open, then almost cried with frustration when her briefcase caught under the dash, slowing her escape.

He was already swinging out, striding around to help her down. He gripped her elbow, steadying her when she almost fell—and another of those quivering shocks travelled up her arm. It was too much. She jerked free, stumbling back, almost oblivious to the cold, steady rain streaming down her face, penetrating the collar of her raincoat and trickling down her neck.

He was talking to her, that smoky, soothing rumble again, as if he were trying to gentle a wild animal. She stared at him blankly for long seconds, not comprehending a word he was saying.

He held both hands up, palms out, in a gesture that cut through her confusion and suddenly made her feel foolish. He had only been trying to help her.

Mortified heat warmed her cheeks. He’d sheltered and protected her, driven her home—his actions those of a man used to caring for women, used to handling them. If he hadn’t grabbed her just then, she would have fallen.

“I’m sorry, I’m not…” She stopped, feeling even more clumsy, more inept. Not what? she thought bleakly. Not used to kindness? Not used to men touching her?

“You’re shaken. You’ve got a head injury. All I want to do is see you safely inside.” His mouth quirked at one corner. “Out of the rain.”

The rain. God, the rain. They were both getting soaked. She drew a breath. “Okay.” With a nod that she instantly regretted, she started up the cracked concrete path.

Anna paused at the door to her apartment, which was little more than a one-room bedsit. She turned to thank him, but he forestalled her.

“I know you don’t trust me, but I’m not leaving until you’ve either called a doctor or you let me take a look at that bump on your head.”

Once again, Anna was struck with confusion. The mere thought that anyone wanted to help her, take care of her, was so alien that for a moment she couldn’t take it in. She fingered the swelling, flinching at the hot bite of pain. Her fingers came away streaked with blood. “You’re a doctor?” She didn’t try to hide her disbelief.

Blade curbed the desire to reach out and try to soothe her with touch. It wouldn’t work, he decided dispassionately. She was as jumpy as a cat with its paw caught in a trap, and just as likely to lash out at him. It wouldn’t take much for her to kick him out on his ass, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. Not until he’d found out the answers to some questions. “I’ve had medical training. I was in the military until a couple of months ago. ‘Combat’ medicine.”

For a moment, Blade thought she wasn’t going to go for it, and he was knocked off balance by another emotion entirely—one he wasn’t pleased to admit to. Something about his ghost caught at his gut, grabbed him deep and hard. He felt…proprietary, protective. He had found her, and he was responsible for her. He wasn’t willing to let her go just yet.

When she put her case down and began digging for her key in her raincoat pocket, relief and satisfaction uncurled inside him. She didn’t want to, but she was going to trust him.

His gaze narrowed as he noted the strain she was still under, and the unusual control she was exerting now, despite the scare she’d just had. She should be shaking, coming apart, and he should be comforting her, lending her a shoulder to cry on if that was what she wanted—but none of those things were happening.

He didn’t know what this woman needed beyond a painkiller and rest. She wasn’t asking for his attention, and, even though she’d given him a measure of trust, he’d had to prise it from her. She would snatch it back in a second if he gave her reason.

She inserted the key in the lock, pushed the door open, stepped inside and flicked a switch. The small, sparse room flooded with the dim light of a naked, low-wattage bulb. Blade followed her in, cataloguing the room in one smooth sweep, noting windows and doors—the action as natural to him as it was to carry the Glock he’d left folded up in his jacket in the Jeep.

His persona shifted from soldier to male as she set the briefcase down beside her tiny dining table and began unbuttoning her coat.

He’d already noted that she was slim; now he saw that she could stand to gain a few pounds, although he knew there were curves beneath those shapeless clothes. When he’d helped her from that ditch, she must have had a dizzy spell, because she’d stumbled. For a split second she’d gone boneless against him and he’d felt the firm pressure of her breasts against his stomach.

She was also shivering and pale, her eyes big in her face. Too damn big. They were an odd colour, a strange, riveting, silver-grey, as if mist and shadows had taken up permanent residence there.

And her mouth… Something kicked hard in his gut. He hadn’t noticed her mouth before, but now that she’d wiped off some of the mud, it took all of his attention. It was pale, lush, pretty and sultry. Grimly, he logged the growing tension in his groin as he closed the door behind him. Oh, yeah…in other circumstances, he would want that mouth.

She bent to unfasten the last button, and in the light, her wet spill of hair, which he now saw was caught back in some loose, intricate braid, took on a warmer hue. Blade stared, transfixed both by the length of her dark hair and by its coppery gleam. When it was dry, it would be a silky veil, cloaking her shoulders, falling past her waist.

Hit number two, he thought bleakly. She was delicately made, and she was a redhead. Now all he had to do was find out what she was running from, and whether or not she had a history of…unusual dreams.

Anna began to shrug out of her coat. She flinched, startled, as her rescuer helped her the rest of the way and then looped the coat over the hook on the back of the door. The easy, matter-of-fact way he carried out that small courtesy caught her attention. She had been right when she’d thought he was used to taking care of women, of handling them. The gesture had been pure gentleman, but the easy way he’d assumed she would let him take care of her had been one hundred percent male.

He studied her forehead, frowning. “You look like you’ve been in a fight. How did you say you got that?”

Anna tried to remember exactly what she’d told him, but her mind was a frustrating blank. The impression her rescuer had made on her was so vivid that she had trouble recalling anything but him. She decided to stick with the truth as far as she could. “Ran into a tree.”

His fingers skirted the edges of the bump, and her insides lurched, both at the tenderness of the bruised area and her tingling awareness of his slightest touch.

“Hate to see the tree,” he murmured.

That surprised a laugh out of her. The laugh hurt—as well as amazed her—and she groaned, lowering herself gingerly onto the single, hard-backed chair pulled up next to the table.

She heard him moving in the kitchenette. Heard her ancient fridge door reluctantly give way to the pressure of his hand, then suck closed with a tight-fisted finality, as if grudgingly giving up some of its meagre contents. A sharp sound had her eyes blinking wide in time to witness the brief tussle as he extracted ice from a frosted-up tray. A cube flipped out, evaded the snaking reach of his big hand and hit the floor. He swore as it skidded away, caught her eye and grinned.

In the dim light of her flat, his teeth were white against his skin—the wide smile so unexpected that she felt like he’d clubbed her with it.

Anna couldn’t drag her gaze from the mesmerising flash of amusement and what it did to the strong, utterly male contours of his face. She swallowed, abruptly stricken by a sense of isolation, of removal from the human condition, so intense that she had to fight the need to curl in on herself and weep. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d shared something as intimate, as silly, as that moment with the ice-cube—let alone the grin. Now that lack stunned her. She felt the deprivation as a piercing ache that drove deep, then burst outward, resolving into a twitching shiver that lifted all the fine hairs at her nape. She was starving for human contact, human warmth, and the knowledge filled her with desperate fear.

She had to pull herself together, and quickly. She was wary of any and all strangers, and had no friends to speak of. She lived this way for a good reason: to stay alive. To feel what she was feeling—this wild, famished hunger for a touch, a smile, from a man she had never met before and would never see again—was beyond odd; it was crazy.

“What’s your name?” Her demand was raspy, hollow, even to her own ears. She didn’t care. Suddenly it seemed very important that, if nothing else, she should have his name.

“Blade.”

He went down on his haunches beside her, and her awareness of the hot sensuality that was as much a part of him as that big-cat grace shuddered through her in another aching wave, as if she were caught in the grip of a fever. He’d wrapped the ice in a tea-towel, and now he gently pressed it to her forehead. All the while, he watched her with an intensity that was blatantly male, speculative, and that made her feel unbearably aware of her own femininity—something she had avoided thinking about for a very long time.

“Blade Lombard,” he finished softly.

Anna froze. Lombard. She blinked, for a moment unable to move beyond this new shock. She knew him. Or, at least, she had known him in another place, another lifetime, when she’d been a child.

A flash of memory surfaced, pitched and rolled with a disorienting sense of deja vu. Before her father died, they had lived in Sydney and moved in the same social stratosphere as the Lombards. Of course, Blade had been older—a lot older, to the five-or six-year-old child she’d been—close to adult status in her eyes. She remembered falling off a bike, and Blade helping her up. He’d comforted her, made her sit in a chair, just like this, while he cleaned her knee and applied a dressing. All the while, he’d resisted the taunts of the other children, bending all of his attention on her.

Would he remember her? she wondered on a beat of despair. And what would she do if he did? Could she risk revealing her identity to him?

The Lombards had had business connections with her father. She could vaguely remember, if not their actual faces, their occasional presence at social gatherings. She wondered if Tarrant Holdings still did business with the Lombards, if Blade and her stepfather were partners in some deal, if Blade was a potential threat to her?

She didn’t dare find out.

The incongruity of Blade Lombard strolling through Ambrose Park at this time of night, or any time—of even being in the vicinity of this rough neighbourhood—struck her more forcibly. Something was wrong. It didn’t fit. He shouldn’t have been there.

No. She couldn’t trust him, no matter how much she wanted to.

Her hand automatically rose to her face, as if she could shield herself from him. When she realised what she was doing, her fingers curled, forming a fist, and she let her hand fall back into her lap.

Blade didn’t miss the wild dilation of the lady’s pupils, her sharp intake of breath, although both reactions could have been attributed to the cold pain of the icepack settling against her forehead.

He didn’t think so. She knew who he was.

Not that recognition was entirely unexpected. Occasionally, some hack reporter got bored for news and sniffed around the Lombard family. The Lombard hotel chain was high profile by necessity, but some of the personal storms his family had weathered had turned into media circuses, adding a certain glamour and notoriety to the Lombard name. Like it or not, they were known.

“And your name?” he demanded quietly.

She stared at him, grey eyes as blank and opaque as a wall of mist.

“Anna Johnson,” she said, without hesitation or inflection, and Blade knew beyond all doubt that his ghost lady was lying.