Fiona Brand - Blade's Lady

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.

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.