Blade's Lady

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.

Chapter 3

Anna let out a shaky sigh when Blade left her holding the ice against her forehead while he went in search of painkillers.

The piercing quality of his gaze had been so unsettling, she had almost given in and told him her real name. For the first time in years, the lie had seemed deceitful, rather than necessary armour against de Rocheford.

He handed her a glass of water and a couple of Paracetamols, then shifted away to lean one hip against the kitchen counter. Arms folded across his chest, he watched her swallow the pills and drink the water.

His steady regard was unnerving. The plain fact was that this room had always been small, but Blade made it seem claustrophobically tiny. It wasn’t just his size, although that was intimidating in itself. It was that he seemed larger than life, brimming with a male power that both fascinated and alarmed her, because he drew her so strongly.

“Have you got family you can contact?” he asked.

Carefully, Anna set the now empty glass down, glad for the bulk of the tea-towel wrapped in ice, because it served to obscure part of her face. “No.”

“A friend?”

She hesitated. If she gave him a name, she might be able to get rid of him sooner. “If I need help, I can call on Tony, from the flat above.”

He frowned. “Boyfriend?”

The sheer ludicrousness of the suggestion made her smile. Tony Fa’alau wasn’t an old man, but he was somewhere north of his fifties, tall and soft-spoken, with a limp. He often turned up at the library and walked her home, but tonight was one of the nights he helped his son, Mike, with security at the video parlour. “No.”

“Good.”

Her heart skipped a beat at the deliberate way he held her gaze, the satisfaction inherent in that one word.

“But you should still see a doctor. I could take you.”

His tone was neutral, but she could feel the relentless, underlying force of his will. He was a man used to taking charge, used to giving orders. With a sense of amazement, she realised he would take her over completely if she let him. “It’s only a bump on the head. Believe me, this one’s not so bad, I’ve had worse.” She stopped, aware that on top of everything else, she now had to squash the urge to confide in him.

“Someone hit you?” he demanded softly.

He didn’t move from his semirelaxed position, but Anna was aware of the change in him. His gaze on her had sharpened, and the relaxed pose was no longer indolent.

“No! I—that is, I was…accident-prone as a child.”

The intensity of his regard didn’t lessen. “What kind of accidents?”

The killing kind.

Anna closed her eyes briefly against the throbbing pain that thought elicited. “I had a couple of nasty falls that ended in concussions.”

She rose to her feet, setting the now melting icepack down on the table, forestalling any further questions, hoping he would take the hint and leave. Her head didn’t spin, and her legs no longer felt like limp noodles. The rest and the ice had helped, and soon the pills would ease the pain even further.

Blade took the hint, but in order to get to the door, he had to pass right by her. He stopped, one hand on the door handle, close enough that she had to reluctantly tilt her head to meet his gaze. Close enough that she realised with a sense of shock that he was more than just damp, he was wet through; that all the time he had cared for her, his clothes had been clinging to his skin. Even as she watched, a droplet of water trailed down his temple, but he ignored it.

“I’m glad you don’t have a boyfriend,” he said bluntly, “but I don’t like it that you’re alone tonight. I’ll leave now, because you’re out on your feet. You need to rest. But I’ll be back tomorrow to check on you. Do you work during the day?”

Anna thought that was a slightly unusual way to phrase the question. Most people worked during the day. “Yes,” she said, not supplying him with any details.

The omission didn’t seem to bother him. “I’ll take you out for dinner, then.”

Anna blinked at the flat statement, wondering if she’d heard wrong. Now she was completely confused. Dinner? That sounded like a date.

Again, her lack of reply didn’t seem to bother him. He lifted a hand, brushed a strand of hair back from her forehead and stared critically at the bump. She drew a breath at the strange tingling heat of his touch, that odd internal jolt, but forced herself to stay very still when he transferred his attention to her eyes, staring intently into first one, then the other.

“Your pupils look fine,” he murmured. “No uneven dilation. How’s the headache?”

“I recognise the beat.”

His mouth kicked up at one corner in a slow smile that did bad things to her heart rate. “I’ve heard it a time or two myself.”

He left in a swirl of damp air, his dark form merging so perfectly with the night that he seemed to dissolve into darkness rather than simply walk through it. Anna shut the door firmly behind him. Her fingers shook so badly, it took several attempts to hook the chain and drive the bolt home.

Too late, she thought blankly. Way too late on more than one count. She should have refused to let him inside.

He had seen through her. When he had questioned her, she’d been as transparent as glass, reeling from the twin blows of the incident at the park and her rescue by someone she knew.

Not to mention her state of disorientation. Usually she had no problems making judgments about people, but her instincts seemed to have gone completely hay-wire. Maybe that was so because Blade’s uncanny resemblance to the man in her dreams had somehow triggered the wild fantasy, so that for a time she had become hopelessly tangled between dreams and reality. The strange burst of heat, the charge of awareness whenever he had touched her, had kept her off balance. She had never felt anything like it—not even in dreams.

Leaning against the door, she pressed the heels of her hands into both eyes, trying to alleviate the gritty sting, the hot ache buried at both temples. The silence of the room slowly sank in, easing some of her tension. She had survived the attack, and she was still in one piece…more or less.

Reaction hit with the suddenness of a locomotive smashing into a concrete abutment. A low sound tore from her throat, and she wound her arms around her middle, hanging on tight as shudders jerked through her.

She had been found!

This time it had taken months and, unlike all the other times, there had been no warning, no quick word from a neighbour or co-worker telling her that someone was asking after her, or watching her flat. And this time someone had come to her rescue.

The memory of her childish pleas to an imaginary knight to rescue her surfaced, and she stiffened, pushing herself away from the support of the door.

“Get real,” she muttered into the quiet emptiness of her room.

Blade Lombard might resemble the knight of her dreams, he might even act like him, but there had been a seasoned edge of danger evident in those cool, black, marauder’s eyes. In ancient times he might well have been a knight, but he would have disdained spending his time hanging around at court or even participating in tourneys. He would have gained his experience in the heat of battle.

He’d said he had worked for the military, and she believed him. She was willing to bet he’d spent his time in the special forces. It would fit that ruthless competence, the easy way he’d taken charge.

He had helped her out, but if he’d been in Ambrose Park merely by chance, any interest he had in her could only be motivated by his sense of responsibility toward the lone female he had rescued, nothing more. She couldn’t question his chivalry or his manners—they were self evident—but that didn’t change what he was. Trouble.

Any woman who spent time with Blade Lombard would automatically attract attention to herself simply by being in his company. She couldn’t afford to be noticed, and she definitely couldn’t afford to have her photo published in any papers or magazines.

Gingerly, Anna stripped off her damp clothing, trying not to move her head any more than she had to. Her coat had kept off the worst of the rain and mud, but her jeans were soaked to the knees, and her sweatshirt was damp in places where her coat had let the water in. After slipping on a pair of baggy sweatpants and a sweater, she sat on the edge of the bed and bent forward to pull on fleecy socks. The motion made her head pound harder, and she straightened up, holding still, waiting out the ache.

Abruptly she was overcome by a barrage of images: the attack on the sidewalk, the outline of her assailant falling, cold light sliding along the length of a gun barrel. She began to shake again, despite the warm clothing, every muscle in her body rigid with tension.

She should be crawling into bed, pulling the covers over her head and sleeping, but she couldn’t afford to do that yet. She had to think, had to move. The man who had attacked her was still out there. He had been limping, which was probably why he had given up the search. He would be back, and it wouldn’t take him long to discover where she lived.

She would have to pack before she went to bed; make decisions about which of her meagre possessions she would take with her. That wouldn’t take long. She could only take what she could carry or load into the large pack she kept beneath the bed.

The following afternoon, Blade turned from the slice of Auckland’s bustling seaport that was visible from his office window to catch the eye of the man seated across from his desk. “You’re telling me she doesn’t exist?”

Jack McKenna, one of Lombards’ most senior executives and more family than employee, shook his head. “Nope. I’m telling you that legally she doesn’t exist. No birth certificate, passport or driver’s licence. No records of insurance, mortgages or bank accounts. No criminal record. Not even a parking ticket. Nada. Nothing.”

“So, Anna Johnson is a false name.”

Blade had suspected as much, but the reality still annoyed him. She’d met his gaze with those haunted grey eyes of hers, and she had lied.

Jack shrugged. “Easy enough to do, so long as she doesn’t own anything that requires record keeping—a house, a car, a bank account. She probably works for cash under the table, so there are no employment or tax records, and pays for any purchases with cash. There are plenty of employers willing to pay slave wages for an employee who’ll work all hours without complaint.”

The door popped open. Jack’s wife, Milly, who doubled as his personal assistant, strode into the room, vivid in a pants suit in some tropical print that was vibrant with blues and oranges. Somehow the colours didn’t clash with her red hair. Blade knew that Milly was forty-something, around the same age Jack was, but she looked closer to thirty.

She slapped some papers down on the desk, almost taking Jack’s nose off in the process. “Here’s the guest list for that charity bash on Saturday. Every man and his dog are gonna be there, including the Prime Minister.”

“Thank you,” Jack said meekly.

Milly planted her hands on her hips. “Don’t flash those blue eyes at me, Jack McKenna. You are not the flavour of the month.”

“No, ma’am.”

“In a few months time, you will be even less the flavour of the month.”

Jack rose to his feet, placed his hands on either side of Milly’s face and kissed her. When he was finished, he sat back down.

“Humph.” Milly glared at her husband, but Blade noticed the way her gaze lingered wistfully on the rumpled front of his shirt.

Before Jack met Milly, he had been obsessively neat. The knife-edge crease in his suit pants and his exquisite taste in ties had been a by-word in the business world. His ties were now definitely anarchistic, and he was frequently rumpled these days.