by Fiona Brand
"He's gone?"
"He's gone." Blade helped her out, controlling his fury at the magnitude of what she'd hidden from him.
He had been worried that she was a criminal, and she was a damn heiress, probably at least as wealthy as he was. He wanted to shake her for keeping so much from him, and he wanted to push her up against the Jeep and kiss her in sheer relief because at last he knew what she was running from.
He clamped his jaw and did neither, his eyes narrowed as he watched her retrieve her briefcase. A nerve pulsed along his jaw. If she loved him as much as she loved that briefcase, he thought grimly, he would be a happy man. Her movements were surprisingly steady, her expression blankly serene, as if she had spent the evening quietly reading at the library instead of dodging bullets. She was as elegantly graceful and independent as a cat, but she had lost another one of her lives tonight.
Blade gritted his teeth and reminded himself that she was tougher than she looked. He might want to wrap her up in cottonwool, but she wouldn't stay there. She had been on the run for years, fooling everyone into thinking she had died in a car crash so she could be safe. She had eluded a hit man twice – that he knew of – and survived under conditions that would have broken most men, let alone a physically weaker woman from a background of pampered wealth. Blade knew experienced, savvy, deep-cover agents who had cried to have their lives back after two years under another identity. Anna had been in the equivalent of deep cover for something like seven years and she had endured.
Oh, yeah, he wanted to shake her for keeping him in the dark, but more than that, he wanted to kill de Rocheford.
"Don't you want to know why I was hiding from de Rocheford?"
Her voice was as pleasantly modulated as if she were asking him if he wanted a cucumber sandwich with his tea. Blade kept a tight lid on his rage as he locked the vehicle. "You're Anna Tarrant," he rasped.
Anna eyed him warily, noting the muscle jumping along his jaw. "You're mad at me."
"Unless you want a stand-up fight in the car park," he said with dangerous softness, "we'll talk about it inside." He took her arm in a firm grip.
"You don't need to frog-march me," she snapped, jerking free.
Blade slowed, but his annoyance didn't lessen. She could feel the hot simmer of it beneath the cold layers of his control. He wouldn't yell or resort to violence; the angrier he got, it seemed the colder he became. Anna wondered what it would take to rip that control away completely, then decided that no sane person would want to find that out.
He took her through a back entrance, then up a private lift to what turned out to be a penthouse suite.
The room she stepped into was large, but more comfortable than opulent, walls painted a mellow ochre, thick carpet that felt soft enough to sleep on, and several leather couches and easy chairs grouped around a coffee table. A dining table occupied one roomy corner, and bookshelves lined one entire wall. A wooden box crammed with toys occupied one corner, as if children were regular visitors here.
The easy welcome of the room made her throat tighten with an unexpected pang of emotion. It wasn't the impersonal hotel suite she had expected; it was a home.
It had been a very long time since she had walked into a home.
She noticed a shelf festooned with colourful plants and walked toward them, wondering if she was seeing things. "What are these doing here?"
They were hers. She would have recognised the pots, even if she hadn't recognised the plants.
"When Seber broke into your flat, he made a mess."
"You saved my plants." She stared at Blade, grappling with this added layer to his personality, and touched almost to tears because she loved her plants and had hated leaving them behind. It was hard to imagine Blade stopping to do something so … domestic.
But Blade's attention wasn't on her plants. "You're hurt."
His hand closed around her wrist, and he pushed back her sweater sleeve. She had a deep, ragged scratch. Blood had run in thin rivulets, spattering her jersey, soaking the sleeve of her shirt. She vaguely remembered catching her clothing on something thorny as she'd run from Seber – a rose stem, maybe.
"It's nothing," she muttered, pulling her wrist free, prepared to ignore the injury, apart from washing it, because on the scale of things the scratch was nothing. "You wanted to talk, so let's get it over with."
Tiredness suddenly overwhelmed her. Her legs felt rubbery, uncoordinated; it was all she could do to cover the short distance to the nearest couch and set her briefcase on the coffee table. She knew it was the adrenalin crash. Two adrenalin crashes, but then, she thought wearily, who was counting?
She perched on the edge of the couch, resisting the urge to relax. If she sank down into that soft leather, she would go to sleep.
Flipping the briefcase open, she began laying out the contents. The items were pitifully few, and shabby: an aging laptop computer she had bought second-hand, the newspaper clippings he'd already spotted in the library – now sadly crumpled – a battered passport, a couple of old credit cards, a heavy gold signet ring.
She held the ring up, watched the light glow on the rich, smooth contours, shimmer off the black onyx inset with initials and a crest worked in gold. "My father's ring."
Her fingers closed around it, making a fist. "Henry stole it." She calmly met Blade's gaze. "I stole it back. I couldn't stand seeing it on his finger. He had no right to it."
"If the ring belonged to your father, then it's yours. You didn't steal it."
"No." Her voice felt raspy, rubbed raw and drained of all emotion. "Henry's taken everything else, but the ring is mine."
She stared at the pitiful items on the table, took a deep breath and made a start. "Henry married my mother, Eloise, about a year after my father died. Then he took my mother and me away from everyone we knew. He isolated us, literally locked us up in his fortress for years. No one came to visit, and as far as I know, no one ever asked about us. It was as if we'd ceased to exist. He never took my mother anywhere, explaining that she 'wasn't well'. He made sure everyone understood that Eloise was mentally unbalanced, and that her daughter was shaping up to be even crazier. The only reason I got out at all was that he couldn't find a legitimate way to keep me out of school and still maintain the fiction that he was caring for us."
She felt the couch shift as Blade sat down beside her. Calmly, he lifted her onto his lap.
"It's all right," he said, when she stiffened in sheer surprise; she had thought he was furious with her. "Relax," he murmured, "I'm just going to hold you, nothing else."
He sat back deeper into the couch, the movement making her fetch up against his chest. His arms folded around her, holding her snug against him. After a startled few seconds, Anna began to relax and let her head rest against his shoulder. The steady beat of his heart vibrated through her, oddly comforting when she considered that every one of her encounters with Blade so far had been fraught with tension.
"Henry first tried to kill me when I was eleven," she said calmly. "No-one would believe he'd pushed me into that river. It was so much easier to think that I'd slipped. There were other attempts over the years, but I managed to survive each one."
"The concussions?"
Anna was startled by the harshness of Blade's voice. "Yes. Henry needed my death to look like an accident, so he was constrained in his attempts. The first three times I tried to convince the local police that what had happened to me hadn't been an accident. They looked into it each time, but Henry was very plausible. In the end, they thought I was a loon – as loony as Henry had convinced everyone my mother was. I became a standing joke in the community. People would stop and point at me and say, 'There goes that crazy Tarrant kid.'"
She told him about the accident that had convinced her she should disappear until she was old enough to claim control of Tarrant Holdings, Henry's legal notice petitioning to have her declared dead, and her efforts to contact the Tarrant lawyers, ending with the Ambrose Park incident.
"Have you been to the police about that?"
"Not yet." Anna pushed away enough so that she could meet his gaze. "You believe me?"
She had to see for herself, because for years she hadn't been believed, and it had never been more important to her.
Blade's gaze was direct, unflinching. "I believe you," he said curtly. "But I could damn well shake you for not telling me this sooner. You nearly died tonight. I nearly lost you."
"Would it have mattered?"
"Yes," he said from between clenched teeth, "it would have mattered."
Emotion welled in Anna, sharp and piercing. It wasn't exactly a declaration of love, but then, she hadn't expected one. At least he believed her.
Blade caught hold of her wrist and turned her arm over so he could examine the scratch. Blood was still leaking sullenly where her sweater kept scraping against the jagged rip. "You need that cut seen to."
"I'll clean it in the shower." Anna looked down at her damp, muddy, blood-spattered clothes. "I don't suppose you have something I could wear?"
His attention focused on her with a possessive intensity. "I'll get you one of my shirts."
Abruptly, he set her away from him and disappeared into a bedroom. He reappeared with a soft, faded chambray shirt in one hand, then showed her to a bathroom sleek with creamy marble and huge well-lit mirrors – the first signs of opulence she'd seen.
"When you're decent, let me know and I'll dress that cut."
He met her gaze in the mirror, and she read his intent. It was easy, because he did nothing to hide his satisfaction that she was in his home, that after she had showered, the only clothes she would have worth wearing would be his. He hadn't said where she would sleep, but she had noticed several doors in the suite, so some of them had to be extra bedrooms. If she wanted, she could have a room to herself; Blade wouldn't force her to share his bed. Not that force would even enter the equation. He had ruthlessly pursued her, kicked all her defences aside; he could have made love to her in the front seat of his Jeep if he'd wanted. He might not know that she'd fallen in love with him, but she wouldn't be able to hide it from him for long.
His dark gaze was flat with certainty, and for good reason. He was going to have her naked beneath him tonight, and they both knew it.
Chapter 9
While Anna was in the shower, Blade took note of the two-hour time difference and rang his brother, Gray, at his home in Sydney.
After several rings, Gray finally picked up.
"What took you so long?"
There was a vague shuffling sound, then Gray said, "Hear that?"
Blade heard muffled hiccupy sounds. "My niece," he murmured. Gray and his wife Sam had had twins just six months before.
"Your nephew," Gray corrected. "He's teething."
"Is that allowed at six months?"
"Not in my rule book. We just got them to sleep through the night. Why are you ringing? Don't tell me the hotel's burned down, because if it has, Sam will make me build it again."
Blade grinned. Gray and Sam had had a long, interrupted courtship that had finally come together at the then Pacific Royal hotel, a crumbling Victorian ruin Lombards had bought specifically for the location. Gray's plans to demolish the building had hit a snag when he had realised how attached Sam was to the old building and to the people she worked with there.
Blade cut straight to the point. "Remember the Tarrants?"
"Tarrant Holdings. Yeah, Dad used to do business with Hugh Tarrant. When Hugh died, Henry de Rocheford took control of the company. Eloise died a few months ago. The daughter, Anna, died several years ago."
Blade used the same tactic Gray had used with his nephew, he held the phone out toward the shower. "Hear that? That's the sound of Anna Tarrant using my shower."
There was a small silence, filled by another distant hiccup and a rustling of cloth. "How do you know it's her?"
"It's her." Blade let the certainty of his statement sink in. He briefly ran through how he'd first found Anna and the sequence of events since then. "She's got credit cards, a signet ring with Hugh Tarrant's initials and the Tarrant crest engraved on it, and a passport. She's changed from the passport photo, but then, she is seven years older. The similarity is still striking."
"She could have stolen those things."
"It's her, Gray. Don't ask me how I know, but it is Anna Tarrant."
"You're sleeping with her."
Blade swore softly beneath his breath. "Not yet," he muttered. He filled Gray in on the night's events and the motivation behind them, fingers tightening on the receiver. When he'd driven around the corner and seen Seber lift his gun and take aim at Anna, he had been poleaxed by fear.
"What do you need me to do?" Gray asked flatly.
Blade leaned back in his chair. That was Gray, straight for the throat. "I need you to use your resources and pull all the information you can on de Rocheford and Seber, and anything to do with the Tarrant family or Tarrant Holdings. I'd like to know exactly what I'm going up against here."
"Have you involved the police yet?"
"We'll do that tomorrow. It's almost midnight here, and Anna needs sleep more than she needs to spend the next few hours kicking her heels in a police interview room. Besides, I don't like exposing her until I know more. So far we don't have one piece of solid evidence that he's trying to kill her, only Anna's testimony, and to get that to stick, we've got to prove her identity first. If I can connect Seber to de Rocheford, he's history."
Gray asked for more specific details and made notes. "Henry was Hugh Tarrant's stepbrother," he said thoughtfully, "but he's no actual blood relation to the Tarrants. From memory, Henry's father was killed in one of the Tarrant mines, and old man Tarrant married Henry's mother but never adopted Henry. When Hugh was born he became sole heir to Tarrant Holdings. When Hugh was killed – also in a mining accident – Henry married his widow." Gray paused. "There's a certain … symmetry to the situation."
"As in Henry saw his chance to grab everything he'd only ever been allowed to look at."
"And if he blamed Tarrants for his father's death in the first place, then that might be even more motive for hurting the Tarrant women."
Blade's stomach tightened when he thought of exactly how de Rocheford had abused the Tarrant women. He had to wonder if Eloise Tarrant's death had been the accidental overdose that was reported. "That man is sicker than I thought," he said grimly.
"I'll e-mail you whatever I can find tomorrow. And Blade … I don't know de Rocheford that well, I doubt anyone does, but he's a cold, efficient bastard when it comes to business. Watch your back."
"Don't worry about my back – it's going to be plenty covered."
Blade heard someone else speak to Gray.
Gray then came back on the line, his rough voice laced with amusement. "Sam wants to know when we're likely to meet this woman. She says Mom's fretting about your long hair and the earring, and Aunt Sophie swears she saw you in some X-rated movie. Sophie's telling all her friends that that stud farm you bought doesn't have a thing to do with horses."
Blade groaned. "What about my lethal weapon status?"
"You've still got that, mate. They're just talking different equipment."
*
Anna rinsed her hair clean of conditioner, and then stood beneath the wonderfully hot stream of water and washed out her bra and panties.
She towelled herself dry, wound the towel around herself, then searched for a hair dryer, which she found in a cupboard, along with a magazine that had been folded open.
Anna read the article as she dried her hair. There was a photo of Blade in evening dress. Clinging to his arm was a beautiful blonde in almost no dress at all. Anna's eyes narrowed at the satisfied look on Blade's face; he looked like a big, happy panther who'd just found a new kitty to play with. She scowled and tossed the magazine back in the cupboard, temper smouldering. Her confidence with men was zero. The last thing she'd needed was a glance at the competition, and according
to the story, there had been a great deal of competition.
The story might have been made up, but she wasn't willing to bet on it. Women would swarm all over Blade, wanting to run their fingers through his silky hair and touch his big muscles. Wanting to know what that beautiful mouth felt like on theirs.
The fierceness of her jealousy took her by surprise, but she didn't pull back from it. She examined her response and decided that whether she had confidence and experience with men or not wasn't an issue. The hell with it. She was in love with Blade, and she wasn't prepared to share.
When she slipped into the shirt, she found that it was more than just big, it swamped her. The tails fell to her knees and the sleeves hung well below her wrists, so that she had to roll them back almost to the shoulder seams. It also smelled subtly of Blade, despite the fresh overlay of laundry detergent.
A delicate tension gripped her, as the suffocating intimacy of the situation hit. Her heart began to pound in sheer panic. Even though she had decided to make love with Blade, the risk she was taking was frightening. All her life she had been losing people she loved; her father, her grandmother, finally her mother. She had lost her puppy to the same river that had nearly claimed her and pledged never to have another pet – never love a pet – that Henry could destroy. She had existed in a void of her own making, carefully guarding herself against the anguish of loss.
It had been a cowardly, empty existence, but it had been safe.
Tonight, Seber had shown her just how empty her safe life had been. When he had lifted that gun in Blade's direction, she'd discovered that nothing mattered to her as much as Blade. Not her identity, not all her lost years or her emotional safety. The threat of Blade's death had shoved everything into a sharp, new perspective.
She no longer cared if she had only a limited time with Blade. She was through with hiding, through with protecting herself. If a small piece of his life was all she could have, then she was taking it.
Anna stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair hung loose and straight, her eyes were dark with excitement. She wondered how she could bear to let him see her like this. She wasn't naked. Shrouded in his shirt, without panties, she felt worse than naked.
