Minutes later, she stumbled free of the trees and stepped into…darkness.
The fall was abrupt, shocking. For long moments she lay unmoving, facedown in what she dimly recognised as the deeply carved groove of a storm drain. The smell of mud and her own fear filled her nostrils; the sound of her racing heart jackhammered in her ears. She still had her briefcase; it was lodged beneath her, its hard edges digging into her stomach, her breasts. She was going to have bruises—lots of them.
Pushing herself onto her hands and knees, she gripped the case and fought to still the sickening spinning in her head. She fingered the tight, tender lump already forming there.
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 chiseled 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
