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
