by Fiona Brand
Clutching a fistful of icy grass, she began to climb out of the ditch. She was almost out, so close, when she lost her footing and, hampered by the awkward weight of the case, tumbled back. A sound broke from her throat. Pain flared, as if someone had just driven a thick spike through her skull, then dissolved into swirling shards of darkness.
Just before the blackness claimed her completely, the elusive threads of the old familiar fantasy she used to escape into when she was a child – and sometimes even now, when she dreamed – wound through her mind.
Her knight.
His face shimmered into vague focus: the long hair, black as midnight satin; fierce, dark eyes; the strong chiselled planes and angles of a face that was both grimly handsome and exotically sensual. Oh yeah, he was a fantasy, all right. Why couldn't you be real? she thought hazily.
Right now, the fantasy, pretty as it was, just didn't do the job.
*
Blade shoved free of the bed. And the dream.
His heart was pounding, his skin damp with sweat, his chest heaving like a bellows. He swore, a low, dark rumble of sound. Dragging unsteady fingers through his hair, he fought to banish the image of mist and rain and darkness. Trees, lots of trees, and a pulsing neon sign. The woman, lying crumpled on the ground, afraid … hunted. A dark bank rearing overhead.
The dream had been strong this time.
A shudder swept him, compliments of the disorientating aftermath of the dream – and other far more potent emotions: his powerful need to intervene, to protect and help her, to push back whatever darkness had hounded first the child, and now the woman with such ferocity that she was somehow propelled into his dreams, his thoughts.
Renewed tension coursed through him. He didn't have a clear idea of what the woman looked like, or her name.
His jaw locked. How he longed to hang a name on her.
If she was real, he reminded himself grimly. Oh baby, if she was real.
Either way, like the other dreams he'd had, Blade had nothing to go on other than the belly punch of the woman's emotions, her desperate thoughts, the stark images that haunted him.
The dreams weren't always about her being attacked, helpless – sometimes they were entirely different.
His breath sifted from between clenched teeth as he pushed a set of bifold doors wide open and stepped naked onto the paved terrace of his penthouse suite at the Lombard Hotel.
A cold, fitful breeze swirled, disturbing the black mane of hair that tumbled to his big shoulders, evaporating the sweat from his skin. He welcomed the ensuing chill that roughened his flesh, made all his muscles tighten.
He stared blindly out at Auckland's version of a winter night, eyes slitted, focused inward, his mind consumed with the woman who consistently invaded his dreams.
Sometimes he made to love to the shadowy woman.
Frustration burned, threatening to erupt into temper. He reined it in. Blade didn't like losing control in any area of his life. This desperate, endless hunger for a woman who existed only in his dreams tormented him, made him helpless in a way he couldn't – wouldn't – tolerate.
Dammit, he didn't even know what she looked like, beyond the fact that she was slim and delicately built, with a silky swath of dark hair that glowed copper in the light, and when he touched her…
A hoarse groan wrenched itself from deep in his throat. When he touched her, it was like touching fire – they both burned.
His jaw tightened. The raw need to possess the woman in his dreams, the flood of pleasure that swamped him at the simplest of touches, haunted him, mocked him. He had never felt anything remotely like it in real life.
Dispassionately, he considered the yawning gulf between the dreams and reality.
His libido was healthy, some might say too healthy, but he was no sexual predator. The primitive desire to possess the woman that permeated those sensual encounters was as alien to Blade as the dreams were. The fact was, he enjoyed women – plural – their friendship and the sex, but he had never needed any of his sexual partners beyond the act.
Broodingly, he paced the width of the terrace, gripped the cold iron of the railing, and faced the disturbing essence of his unease. He wanted the dreams to be real. More, he hungered for what he experienced in the dreams but had never found anywhere else. Every time he touched a woman, made love to her, he was aware that he was grasping for that exquisite, primitive intensity and not finding it.
The breeze kicked up, sending moist air whirling like a damp cloak about his shoulders. The deepening chill matched the bleakness of his thoughts. When he was buried deep inside a woman, he shouldn't have to feel … alone.
Then there was the matter of control. If he made love to a woman, he retained control. All the way.
And he never made love with strange women. He had certain standards, a code of honour that was as simple and ruthlessly direct as a set of military orders. One of the rules of engagement was that he always insisted on an introduction first.
He began to notice the cold. His breath condensed in the air, mist wreathed the streetlamps below and hung in streamers across the road. It was also drizzling, a light, drifting drizzle.
Like the dream.
Traffic was sporadic, but still steady. He could see couples strolling, maybe catching a movie or supper at one of the street cafes.
It wasn't that late. He had only been asleep for a short time. The dream must have taken hold of him the second his head had hit the pillow. There was an odd jolting sensation he'd come to recognise, as if some internal switch had been thrown. Then the dream unravelled. Images. Impressions. Sometimes nothing but a jumble, sometimes pictures that were startlingly clear. Like tonight.
He cursed as the images replayed themselves in his mind. He remembered the vivid blue and red of the neon sign. The sign had said…
Gamezone.
His head came up, nostrils flaring as if he'd caught an elusive scent, one he'd been seeking for more years than he cared to count. If only to disprove it.
"Gamezone."
He said the name out loud, letting it linger on his tongue, as if testing the veracity of the syllables.
With a harsh exclamation, he strode inside, switched on a lamp and reached for the telephone book.
He was clutching at shadows. Maybe when he came up with another blank the stranglehold on his gut would ease up.
Despite reason and cold logic, his pulse hammered as he searched through the book, ran his finger down a page … and stopped.
"Son of a bitch."
Blade's heart slammed once, hard, against the wall of his chest. His gaze narrowed at the bold type advertising a games arcade in one of the seedier areas of town, but no matter how hard he looked at the address, it didn't disappear.
Gamezone.
Blade stared at the garish blue and red sign. A sign he remembered but had never seen.
His gaze swept the surrounding area, noting the unmistakeable uniformity of state housing jammed cheek by jowl with clusters of badly built apartments. Definitely down at heel.
A darkened area caught his eye. A park.
He called himself crazy, but put the Jeep Cherokee in gear and cruised closer, noting the name of the park, the broken lights, the shabby plastered pillars guarding the entrance. Swinging the Jeep into a space, he pulled on a leather jacket, eased it over the fit of the Glock shoved snug in its shoulder holster, checked the knife in his boot and grabbed a torch, but didn't turn it on.
Thunder rolled, giving a low-register warning of the incoming storm. The strengthening breeze scattered rain in his face, bringing with it scents that were city-tame, others that were earthy, wild. Something equally uncivilised unravelled inside Blade, and despite the fury and frustration that still ate at the edges of his temper, he bared his teeth in a cold grin. He stood by the Jeep for long seconds, his senses animal-sharp as he stared across the expanse of grass and trees with eyes peculiarly well-adjusted to the smothering blackness.
When he'd been
with the Special Air Service he'd been called names – he'd been called lots of names – but he couldn't completely deny the wolf's blood that was purported to run in his veins. He felt like howling right now.
He should be tucked up in bed, getting his beauty sleep. Or, better still, tucked up in bed with a beauty and getting no sleep at all. Not hunting a … ghost.
A chill went through him, along with echoes of urgency and the compulsion that had driven him out into the night. He had to check. Gamezone had been real. For his own peace of mind, he had to check.
If she was real…
He rejected the thought. She couldn't be real. Better to think about what he was going to do when he didn't find a woman – like which psychiatrist he'd choose to oversee his therapy, and whether or not he should have himself committed.
He searched the area, coldly, efficiently, and found nothing.
Finally he walked the perimeter and found the storm water drain … and his ghost.
Chapter 2
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 t
he 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.
