Can a white knight change from protector to lover?
Fleeing for her life, Nikki Ashton rounds a corner and runs into an unyielding wall of man. Injured and desperate for rescue, she’s the very picture of a damsel in distress. Businessman Harper Beaumont is more than willing to act as her white knight—and after taking care of her he offers Nikki the career chance of a lifetime.
But Nikki sees more in Harper than just her savior. She sees a man she can fall in love with. But Harper needs a strong, passionate woman at his side, and though Nikki knows she can be that woman for him, he only views her as a girl in need of protection…
This Retro Romance reprint was originally published in November 1992 by Mills & Boon.
Cry Wolf
Amanda Carpenter
Chapter One
Nikki Ashton was running for her life when she stumbled around the corner of an old brick building and blundered headlong into the hard, unyielding wall of someone’s chest.
They had caught her. There would be no second chance, nowhere else to run. As strong arms encircled her, Nikki screamed, a terrible lonely cry from a soul that had found its hell in utter hopelessness.
She was taken by the shoulders and shaken once, a hard, decisive gesture, before the man let go of her as if she bore some kind of contagious disease, and his mellifluous voice over her head cracked sharp as a steel-tipped whip, as hard as the hands that had held her, and as pitiless. “Get a hold of yourself, woman! I’m not going to rape you, for God’s sake. Bumping into you was an accident!”
Left without support, her legs collapsed underneath her, and she tumbled to the ground, but Nikki’s head lifted. Whoever she had run into, it was not one of the two men who had dragged her down a dark alley and attacked her. Yellow light from a streetlamp halfway down the filthy block shone on her short black hair and gleamed on the high pale cheekbones of the small face, the great drowning pools of summer-blue eyes.
All she could see was a black towering figure, for the light came from behind him. He seemed to hesitate, but only for a moment. She reached desperately to pluck at the trousered leg so fleetingly close, but the material slipped agonisingly through fingers that could not curl to grasp it properly.
“Don’t go—” she gasped, the harsh sound breaking from a parched throat, and perhaps it was just the rebirth of hope that had her imagining that the unidentifiable figure hesitated again. The same hope had tears destroying sight so that she dashed one hand across her face and left a wet, sticky trail. “Please,” she whispered. “I’m in trouble.”
That wet, sticky streak stood out like a beacon against the snow-white pallor of her face, for it was blood.
“Dear God,” said the man in a completely altered tone of voice. He squatted in front of her, and Nikki looked into a dark brown gaze that, when softened, would look like velvet, but now stabbed rapier-sharp. “You’re American, aren’t you? What the hell are you doing in Soho at night? Don’t you know, you witless creature, this is no place for a sightseeing trip on your own?”
“Does it look like I’m on a sightseeing trip?” she exploded in furious reaction, cradling her curled hands against her breast, for they were on fire. Since flight no longer seemed imperative, the pain had room to come back. “I’m lost and two men are chasing me! There was one just behind me—that’s why I ran around the corner so hard!”
The man rose to his feet and walked away. Stunned, Nikki bowed her dark head over her injured hands. The hope, then, had been for nothing.
But he had simply gone to the street corner, peered around it and strode back. He knelt and said, sounding brusque, “There’s no one there now, but we shouldn’t stay here in case they come back. Are you hurt too badly to walk?”
In spite of his curt tone, the large hand that wiped the smear of blood from her face, then took hold of both of hers and turned them open, was very gentle indeed. She straightened her fingers as much as she could for his inspection, long, delicate fingers she had always kept neatly, had always cared for so well. The palm of each hand was slashed with a diagonal cut, from the base of the index finger to the opposite corner, and both were still bleeding.
The man drew in a quick breath, eyes widening with shock before they filled with a terrible fury. His hard brown gaze lifted to hers. “They did this to you?”
“They tried to do worse!” she snapped, the embers of outrage flaring again to animate the delicate lines of her face. “I grabbed the wrist of the one with the knife. When he yanked away, I did this to myself.”
One of his eyebrows lifted satirically at the sight of Nikki’s sparkling blue eyes and aggressive, jutting chin, for, terrified or not, she looked ready to do battle all over again. “We need the police and a doctor,” he said decisively. “Let’s get you to the nearest phone.”
He drew her to her feet, where she swayed unsteadily until he put one arm around her waist and helped her down the street, his lean athletic body brushing hers with each fluid stride. Nikki had recovered herself enough to notice details about him. His head was grey all over, a thick, vibrant pelt of iron hair like a wolf’s.
The nearest phone happened to be in the stranger’s car just two blocks down. Nikki stared wryly at the subdued elegant length of the black Jaguar as he fitted his key into the lock. The car suited the rolling, coiled grace of the tall man, but only as an accessory. This was not the kind of man who needed a status-symbol car to proclaim his worth to the world. This was a man who took quality and used it, but did not give it too much importance in his mind. She had known many men like that, and from long experience she knew power when she looked it in the face.
Her terror-induced adrenaline had receded but the resulting depression had not yet set in, so Nikki was remarkably clear-thinking, almost light-headed. When the grey-haired stranger turned to help her into the passenger-seat, she felt everything he did as separate and important in itself: the quick sensitivity of his dark eyes assessing her present condition, the long, graceful hand he extended that was saved from being willowy by the sheer breadth of physical strength across the palms, the tiny predatory shift of his lean, impassive face as he scanned the empty street one last time.
Understated, she thought, settling into the seat as he shut the door and moved to the driver’s side. Restrained. Then she thought of the expression in his hard dark eyes as he had looked down on her poor hands. No, leashed.
As soon as he had got into the car, he pressed the automatic door locks. His startlingly grey head turned to her as the metallic bolts thunked into place, the ungentle gaze boring into hers. A card player’s face, a boardroom face long familiar with power manoeuvres, and not as old as the grey hair might indicate; Nikki met his gaze with unfeigned composure.
“Don’t you have even the slightest apprehension at being locked in a stranger’s car?” he said sardonically.
Watch those hard eyes. Nikki pointed out with absolutely no trace of anger, “I am alive. If I had not run into you, I might be dead now. That tends to put things into a certain perspective.”
“Perhaps you extend your trust too easily,” he said silkenly.
She gave him a tiny smile, then shaped her reply with a succinct baring of even white teeth. “A case of the devil and the deep blue sea?”
There was still no facial change, but his gaze, locked with hers, undertook a subtle shift. Nikki’s heart pounded once, hard. His eyes lowered, and as he lifted the white scarf from around his neck he said, “Hold out your hands.”
No reassurances were forthcoming. For all she knew of him, he could be waiting to tie her up. Nikki was quite adept at reading nuances; she was to make of him what she would, and cope with her reactions in her own way
. It was another key to the man. He had a certain amount of compassion, but it only went so far, and without so much as saying a word he was telling her what he must have said to many a business associate: deal with it or get out.
She smiled with genuine amusement. It lit her features, transforming her into a wise woman, and told him more clearly than anything else could have done that she saw through him and was not cowed. The last person able to do so had died five years ago, and not even she had possessed such a straight purity of gaze. This young woman was rare.
He took hold of the silk scarf with both hands and the broad shoulders underneath the black evening jacket flexed effortlessly. The fragile material tore, a tiny violent sound. Nikki held out her wounded hands in a gesture that was expressly vulnerable, and with great care he wrapped the ruined pieces of expensive silk around her palms.
Then he reached across her, an unexpected movement that made her blink with surprise as she shrank back instinctively in her seat, either to give him room or to avoid contact—she wasn’t sure which. He grasped her seatbelt, pulled it across her slight body and buckled her in. “I wasn’t aware that we intended to go anywhere,” she said with some acidity, and earned for herself a sidelong ironic glance.
“Maybe you might prefer sitting here for an hour or two until the police arrive, but, I assure you, I do not,” he informed her with a bored impatience. So sorry that I wasn’t psychic enough to read your intentions, she murmured in silent sarcasm, for some reason piqued that he then proceeded to ignore her existence.
After fastening his own seatbelt and starting the car, he switched the car phone on to an intercom so that he could talk while driving, and he punched out a phone number on the lit display, while Nikki grimaced to herself and hunched down in her seat.
The Jaguar purred down the quiet side-street and merged with the Thursday night London traffic as the amplified tones of the telephone connection rang and rang. By the various electronic clicks Nikki knew that the call had been redirected twice before someone actually answered.
It was a man, and he sounded impatient. “Yes?”
“Gordon,” said the grey-haired man beside her, who had been silent so long that she jumped. Unimpeachable British accent, she mused irrelevantly. Probably Estonian. “Are you in London?”
“Yes.”
“Could you be at my town house in a half an hour?”
“If it’s important.” The tone of the man on the other end of the phone had changed drastically, all impatience gone.
“Bring your medical bag.”
“Harper, are you all right?” The question came across sharply, and told Nikki a number of things. The man she sat beside was named Harper—Mr. Harper?—and Gordon on the other end of the connection was not only a doctor, but a friend.
“Don’t worry, I’m fine,” he said briefly. “But I have someone with me who has hurt her hands, perhaps badly.”
“Give me twenty minutes.”
The man beside her broke off the connection just as they pulled up to the gaudy, iridescent light displays at Piccadilly Circus where traffic was snarled to nearly a standstill. Nikki had never seen it any other way and she looked around her with a lively interest.
Nikki used to think she had a fairly good sense of direction until she came to live in London, where all the streets twisted and curved and intersected at the queerest angles. It was because the city was so old. If she came out of the wrong exit from the Tube, she was reduced to searching for her bearings with the help of a dog-eared A to Z book of maps. She used to be charmed by the riotous maze of cobbled streets, but that confusion had nearly killed her tonight.
She had been close to Leicester Square, which had always seemed so safe because of the crowds from the nightclubs, the West End theatre-goers, the tourists, and the ever present black taxi cabs. Leicester Square was the immediate neighbour of Soho, where she had never dared to go, for though it was littered with restaurants it was also littered with drunks, prostitutes, porno nightclubs, and it was a very dangerous place to be at night for a young woman on her own.
The two men who had attacked her had worked as a team, driving her as if she were an animal into Soho’s unplumbed depths.
Harper next called the police, explained the circumstances, and made arrangements for someone to meet them at his address near Berkeley Square in Mayfair. Aside from supplying her name when asked, Nikki remained silent throughout the exchange, bemused at the direction her life seemed to be taking without her volition, studying the man beside her with an almost dreamy fascination.
His dark glance shot over to her, swiftly and without warning, and caught her narrow-eyed perusal before she could mask it. His eyebrows raised almost imperceptibly. They were black, Nikki noticed, and sleek and arced just enough to lend a hint of unpredictability to an extremely handsome face.
Harper Beaumont.
His name didn’t mean anything to her. But when he gave it to the police she heard the instant, utter respect in their response.
Her earlier impression was accurate, then. This was a very powerful man indeed.
One learned certain things when one stayed for any length of time in a city, and among them were which areas to avoid and where the rich lived. Nikki knew of the multimillion-pound mansions along Bishop’s Avenue in Hampstead, the upper-class St. John’s Wood, trendy Chelsea. Then of course there was Mayfair, south of Oxford Street, west of Hyde Park, site of the American Embassy and redolent with that psychic brush of power personified in the man beside her.
The Jaguar purred through the expensive neighbourhood like a cat on a midnight prowl, where the stone buildings were latticed with high black wrought-iron gates and the windows that glowed with golden light were shrouded in curtained privacy. One could smell politics from a mile off, she thought drily, and money. A lot of money. The car slowed and turned towards a basement garage, the door of which lifted in electronic silence, and they slid down into darkness.
“Stay where you are,” said Harper as he climbed out of the car. Grimacing, for she couldn’t see a thing, Nikki did as she was told.
The basement garage flooded with light, revealing very neatly kept shelves and more room than she had expected, and Harper strode around the car to her side, opening the door and bending to unbuckle her seatbelt. “Thank you,” she said drily as she climbed out of her seat.
He turned on his heel; this man had neat, precise movements that spoke not only of control, but a conservation of his energy and a universe made to order. But, she reflected, some men got too used to giving orders. She followed him up half a flight of stairs, through a door, and they were confronted by a small dark-haired man, impeccably dressed in a suit.
“Sir,” said the man with a slight bow.
“Duncan, we will shortly be having visitors. Ah, forgive me,” said Harper smoothly, “we already have one. This is Nikki Ashton. See to her comfort, will you? Don’t touch her hands, Dr. Stanhope is coming. Er—Nikki, this is my man, Duncan Chang.”
So he was Eurasian, and, by his bowed greeting, more Asian than European. Harper moved to one side and she got her first full look at the small, neatly proportioned man with sleek black hair, sallow, old ivory skin, and the dark impassive eyes which had a slight tilt but were not slanted. Duncan could have been twenty-five, or forty-five.
She pressed her bandaged hands together, carefully, as they throbbed, and inclined her head to him slightly, in a very Western approximation of the Oriental courtesy, and surprised the manservant into a smile of amused delight. Harper’s laser-beamed glance shot to the back of her skull, sharp, imperious; she must have imagined it, for he was turning to stride smoothly towards the front lounge to leave her with Duncan Chang.
“If you would come with me, Miss Nikki,” murmured the man who was of the same height as she, “I shall fix you a hot drink. Do you like tea?”
“Yes, both Indian and Chines
e,” she replied as she followed him into a compact but excellently appointed kitchen. Duncan indicated a chair at the small table in one corner, and she settled herself as he whirled around the kitchen with a dancer’s grace. “And please, I am just Nikki.”
Very quickly the small task was accomplished. Duncan asked, “Shall I, as the English say, play Mother for you?”
Nikki nodded and replied, “Yes, please. Milk, one sugar. Tell me, did you happen to learn English in Canada?”
Again Duncan smiled as he set a steaming cup of tea in front of her; only later was she to find out how rare that was. He told her, “My father was Canadian, my mother from Peking. Living in England as I now do, it makes me somewhat a patchwork quilt, don’t you think?”
Patchwork quilt, yes. Just as she was patchwork, comprised of the many places she had been to. But the strength of will that sewed her together was now unravelling raggedly at the seams. The depressing comedown from adrenalin and the distressing events of the evening hit with heavy suddenness. Nikki bowed her head and hid her eyes in one bandaged hand.
The kindness in Duncan Chang’s voice nearly undid her. “You are in pain, yes? I would offer you aspirin, but Dr. Stanhope will soon be here and shall undoubtedly wish to give you something else.”
She had control, at least, of her voice. “Yes, I know, but thank you for the thought.”
The front doorbell went, a muted sound coming over the small intercom by the kitchen door. The manservant pressed a button, and a voice she recognised from the car phone said, with all the impatience back in abundance, “Gordon here. Let me in, Duncan.”
“Certainly, Dr. Stanhope. Will you excuse me, Miss Nikki?”
“Certainly, Mr. Duncan,” she said, taking a very gentle revenge for his persistent usage of “Miss”, and she was rewarded with the sight of a grin that was smothered hastily before the manservant left her alone in the kitchen.
Her body felt strung out from the various reactions she had gone through in the last hour and a half, muscles like toffee that had been pulled too thin. Only two hours ago she had started her way home from the cinema at Leicester Square to her roomy bed-sit in Knightsbridge without an inkling of the terror and the pain to come, without the slightest premonition of this place or these people.
Cry Wolf Page 1
