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 the 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.
The documents and photos weren’t conclusive proof of her identity—she could have stolen them—but she clung to them; they were hers. She had changed—her breath caught in her throat when she thought of just how much she had changed—but the strong resemblance in those photos was all she had. When she’d stumbled, bruised and bleeding, from her wrecked car all those years ago, she had simply picked up her purse and run. She’d had the clothes on her back, the jewellery she had been wearing and some cash. She hadn’t dared use the credit cards.
She had escaped Henry’s last, clever attempt on her life by sheer blind luck. When her car’s brakes had failed, a tree had been all that had stopped a certain plunge over the cliff’s edge into the water far below.
Her utter helplessness in the face of her stepfather’s relentless determination to remove her from his path had almost paralysed her with fear; but she had known in that moment that she couldn’t afford to stay around—certainly not until she was twenty-seven—and give him another opportunity to kill her. When she’d later discovered that Henry had decided to cut his losses and had pushed her car over the cliff, making it look like she’d died, she had known she’d made the right decision.
She hadn’t gone to the police. She had already tried that avenue, and no one had listened. She’d been twenty years old, and Henry had seen to it that her credibility was less than zero. He had painted a convincing picture of a hysterical young woman balanced on the edge of mental instability. He had done a great job of character assassination, and she had played into his hands on several occasions by openly accusing him of trying to murder her, from the age of eleven on. It had been a case of people thinking she was crying wolf. Even her own mother had believed she was mentally unstable.
Until the sabotage on her car’s brakes, Anna had begun to believe it herself.
No one had given credence to the notion that Henry de Rocheford was doing anything more than looking out for the interests and welfare of the Tarrant family, as he had “selflessly” done for years.
She had to wonder if anyone would now.
Minutes later, they were standing in the shadow of the entranceway to the park.
Anna’s wet coat clung and dragged. Moisture was seeping through in several places, and she was shivering, but she didn’t protest; she wanted to check the street before she stepped out onto it.
Despite the fact that she’d insisted she was capable of walking, she felt disconcertingly weak and was sharply aware that she was in no shape to handle anything else the night might throw at her. She swayed, her hand groping for the rough surface of one of the stone pillars for support, and didn’t protest when the stranger wrapped his arm around her waist, clamping her close against his side. The solid barrier of his body protected her from much of the wind and rain, and the heat that poured from him drove back the worst of the chill. Anna stiffened at her ready acceptance of the stranger’s protection, the extent of her trust in him when she didn’t trust anyone, the disturbing memory of those moments when she’d
